Jules Bailey BA ’01 elected to Oregon House of Representatives

January 26, 2009

Jules Bailey BA ’01

Jules Bailey BA ’01 was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives this fall. The following is an update about Bailey written by senior political science major Ben Brysacz for a site devoted to the Pamplin Society, of which both Bailey and Brysacz are members:

Pamplin Fellow Jules Bailey BA ’01 has some new digs in Salem. Formerly Jules Kopel-Bailey, Bailey was elected to represent District 42 in the Oregon House of Representatives. This district—including the heart of Southeast and portions of nearby Northeast—is so consistently Democratic, that the primary election, rather than the general election, is the real contest. In the race to replace outgoing Representative Diane Rosenbaum, Bailey faced three other democrats and finished with 41 percent of the vote, more than 10 points ahead of his closest rival. He had no Republican opponent in November, and handily defeated Pacific Green Party candidate Chris Extine.

Bailey has a dizzying resume. A native of Portland, he attended Lincoln High School, and worked on invasive species removal in Forest Park before starting classes at Lewis & Clark. He then took a leave from Lewis & Clark to work for a Swiss development company in Vietnam. After returning to LC to complete his degrees in International Affairs and Environmental Studies, Bailey won a Truman Scholarship, which he used to spend a summer working in Washington, DC at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through a policy program with the Brookings Institution. From there, he went on to earn a Master’s in Public Affairs and Urban and Regional Planning from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Professionally, Bailey has worked as a policy analyst for Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradley, as a consultant for UNICEF in the Sudan, and currently as a Senior Policy Analyst at ECONorthwest, an economic consulting firm here in Portland. Oh, and he also speaks Mandarin Chinese.

On leave from ECONorthwest for the duration of the legislative session, Bailey has been assigned to four committees: Sustainability and Economic Development, Environment and Water, Transportation, and Revenue. He has several big goals in this session including an energy efficiency bill, which he’s been working on “every waking moment since the end of the primary.” The program would use publicly and privately-financed loans to pay for homeowners and small businesses to retrofit their buildings for energy efficiency. The loans would be repaid slowly through utilities bills, but consumers would actually see a net decrease in these bills as a result of increased efficiency. The real beauty of the program though, according to Bailey, is that it will be revenue neutral.